KashiaExplores: Tales of Discovery

“Ważne są dni, których jeszcze nie znamy” — “Important are the days we do not know yet.”
I first heard Marek Grechuta’s voice drifting through a scene in Boys Don’t Cry. The melody stayed with me long after the film ended. There was something tender yet steady in the way Grechuta sang about time, loss, and resilience — as if he knew that sorrow, too, could be gentle if we let it. The song is about confronting tragedy, about the quiet art of continuing. It promises that even after everything breaks, the heart can still be warm — still hopeful.

Then came “Przez ile dróg,” the Polish version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
I remember hearing it and recognizing, even as a child, that its questions reached far beyond translation. How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
That was the first time I realized how often art travels unseen — borrowed, adapted, sometimes uncredited. Many of the songs I thought were Polish had been carried across borders, re-born in another language.

This one, though, had a special place in my childhood. It opened every new school year — a kind of anthem for beginnings. I can still hear it echoing through the school hall, soft and solemn, as we stood in rows with ribbons in our hair and new notebooks in our hands.

Later came The Beatles — “You Say Yes, I Say No” and “Yellow Submarine” — and “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and the Papas.
Those songs arrived with my first English lessons, when I was thirteen. Our teacher believed music was the best way to learn a language, and she was right. She sang with us, taught us the rhythm of English through melody. She also led the school’s music club and shared stories of her own adventures — sailing through storms, learning sea shanties, collecting songs like postcards from faraway harbours. Her voice and her stories made me want to explore life in the same fearless way.

From there, the road led to Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.
“Mercedes Benz” and “People Are Strange” were the first songs I learned by heart.
The first — a tongue-in-cheek prayer for comfort in a world obsessed with possessions — felt oddly familiar. I grew up with little, but never felt poor, because I had music and books.
The second became the anthem of my adolescence. I was sixteen, standing at my first punk concert, meeting Żaneta and Zuzanna. I had always felt like an outsider, awkward and unseen, and “People Are Strange” mirrored that feeling perfectly. It made loneliness sound like a song instead of a wound.

These songs — from Grechuta’s quiet hope to Joplin’s raw laughter — form a map of the inner places I’ve travelled.
Each melody is a compass point, each lyric a memory.
Together they tell the story of who I was becoming: a listener, a wanderer, a dreamer still learning to hum along to the rhythm of her own life.

When I was younger, my emotions rose quickly to the surface. I shouted when I was angry, as if the only way to be heard was through noise. It wasn’t deliberate; it was simply the language I had learned. In my family, emotion was something you projected, not something you examined. For years, I carried that habit without question.

Now I no longer shout. When anger comes, I watch it arrive — a familiar guest, but one I no longer invite to stay. I let it sit quietly inside me until I can take it elsewhere: onto a long walk, or to the treadmill, where I run until the body takes over what the mind cannot carry. Sweat becomes a form of translation, converting frustration into breath. When I finish, equilibrium returns, and the world feels restored to its proper rhythm.

In those earlier years, I was absorbed in myself — always turning the mirror inward, rehearsing how I might appear to others. I wanted to impress, to be seen as interesting, exceptional, alive. Over time, I discovered that the act of listening holds a different kind of power. When you listen — truly listen — the world rearranges itself. Curiosity opens quiet doors. Humility softens the edges of perception. I still long for recognition, but now it’s the kind that carries meaning: to create something of worth, something that might shift the air for someone else, even slightly.

I used to think happiness meant movement — the accumulation of experience, the endless pursuit of the new. I chased it through plane tickets and certificates, new skills and passing fascinations: scuba diving one year, kitesurfing the next. Always another horizon. But now I understand happiness differently. It isn’t expansion but depth. It’s the stillness that follows motion, the moment when all the years of doing settle into being. To sit quietly, to hold one thought steady without trembling — that, I think, is the truest form of joy.

The one thing I have lost and still long to recover are the photographs from my many trips to Spain with my former partner. There were so many of them—snapshots of adventure, of wind in my hair as I skimmed the water on a windsurf in Safaga, Egypt; sunlight and laughter; two people who once believed in forever. They carried the weight of nine years together, the imprint of our youth, of finding each other, of learning who we were—together—and the faint outline of who I once was.

They vanished in 2017, the year our lives began to drift apart. He flew to Cape Town; I to India—each of us seeking distance in our own way. His laptop, holding the archive of our shared past, was packed into his checked luggage. Somewhere over the equator, the hard drive was smashed. With it went every photograph, every frozen second of our story—along with my own images from my student years, the first hitchhiking trips, fragments of a life I was still learning to inhabit. I had stored them on his computer after mine broke. I never bought a new one. There was no backup, no cloud, no second chance.

Those files had held our world: the trip to Rome where he proposed, and the horse-drawn carriage waiting outside the Colosseum. I remember bargaining with the driver, refusing his absurd price of one hundred euros for a ride I didn’t even want, while Will smiled, mistaking my irritation for playfulness. I didn’t know what was about to unfold in the next few minutes. There were photographs from Zakopane, where I hiked through a fever, wrapped in a blue jumper that read Mi hermana—a souvenir from my first trip to Spain with my once-lost friend José. And Barcelona, with Kaya—who drank too much, locked us out of the Airbnb I had booked and paid for, and laughed about it later.

There were also the photographs from Greece, taken during a holiday with his university friend Mat—the man who never forgave me for an impatient remark and made sure I remembered it. I still see that car ride along the coast: Mat’s girlfriend driving while he mocked women behind the wheel. I told him to stop, called him a chauvinistic pig. Will said nothing. Later, he pulled me aside and asked me to apologize.
“For calling him a pig?” I asked. “Or for calling out his chauvinism?”
“For the word pig,” he said quietly.

I sat in the back seat, hidden behind sunglasses, silent tears slipping down my face, wondering why I was with someone whose silence always outweighed my voice.

Those photographs are gone now—the good moments and the bad, the bright Mediterranean days and the uneasy silences. Perhaps that’s how memory works: it keeps what it must and lets the rest dissolve. Yet sometimes I think that if I write about them—if I give the stories form—the images might return. Not to my eyes, but to the part of me that still remembers what it felt like to be there.

Sometimes I wonder if friendship is just a form of emotional squatting—someone moves in, takes up mental space rent-free, and refuses to do the dishes. And in my life, that someone is Layla.

Let me be clear: I have nothing against people with ADHD. I respect neurodiversity. But Layla? Layla seems to treat her ADHD like a pet dragon she feeds exclusively on Haribo and impulse buys. She’s allergic to structure, addicted to shiny distractions, and insists on dragging me along for the ride—usually while dragging three overstuffed bags of mismatched nonsense.

She moves flats like I change playlists: constantly, without warning, and based entirely on vibes. This year marks her second relocation in just over twelve months. I helped her pack last time. And now? Guess who’s being summoned again? I had plans—real, grown-up, self-care plans. A canal-side café, a few quiet hours of writing, some sweaty redemption at the gym. Instead, I’m roped into another cardboard-box opera starring Her Royal Chaoticness.

And the worst part? She’s not learning. She keeps picking dodgy landlords like she’s on a game show called How Fast Can You Regret This Lease? She complains endlessly about rising rents, as though the entire housing market is personally conspiring against her. There’s no strategy, no reflection, just chaos on repeat.

Every time we meet, it’s a one-woman monologue—her job, her flat, her boyfriend Rami (a human mood board for disappointment). I rarely hear a single proactive word. Just a low hum of discontent set to the rhythm of poor decision-making.

Even on my birthday trip to Alicante—a supposed celebration of me entering the fabulous 40s—Layla turned into a wandering toddler. She didn’t know the address of our Airbnb, had zero interest in contributing, and basically just floated along behind us. If she got lost, she’d probably end up adopted by a local fisherman, none the wiser.

She stopped every five minutes to window shop or buy some ridiculous trinket: rainbow backpacks, novelty kitchen utensils, hairpins shaped like sushi. All things destined to either explode out of her hand luggage or remain forever buried under the weight of other shiny, forgotten objects.

She’d return to the beach like a magpie with a PowerPoint presentation: “LOOK WHAT I FOUND!” and proceed to unpack her loot like we were on QVC: Beach Edition. Maya politely played along. I said nothing, biting my tongue with the intensity of a monk in silent retreat.

And then there were the olives.

On our final day, she raided the fridge like a doomsday prepper with a conscience. She refused to let any food go to waste. Which, in theory, is admirable. In practice? We were forced to feast on lukewarm olives under a slowly melting sun. She brandished them like an eco-warrior with snack-based guilt. Meanwhile, her hair was twisted up with a pencil in some sort of tragic faux-Japanese bun, flopping around like her attention span.

I didn’t help. My hands were sandy. My spirit was too.

Then came the moment of… I won’t call it grace, but let’s say, shared suffering.

The weight of “parenting” Layla that day didn’t fall solely on me, for once. There were five of us in the group, and Karina—sweet, patient, fresh-to-the-torture Karina—took the brunt. Possibly because she’s the one who’s spent the shortest amount of time with Layla over the years and therefore hasn’t developed the emotional scar tissue the rest of us have.

It’s true what they say: compassion has an expiry date, and it spoils faster the longer you know someone.

Around six in the evening—hours after they had eaten sandwiches during their shopping spree—she suddenly announced she was hungry. Maya and I were the only ones who’d skipped the shopping and gone on a four-hour hike along the coast. She had this idea that she could live off the tiny sachets of olives and crisps she’d been hoarding. Karina, who had spent the whole afternoon as her unofficial handler-slash-financial advisor, gently reminded her, “I don’t remember us eating sandwiches.”

To which Layla replied, wide-eyed, “Of course we did! It was right after I bought the little rucksack!”

Karina blinked, sighed with the weary grace of a preschool teacher, and offered a resigned smile:
“Oh yeah. I remember now. I think your ADHD is becoming contagious…”

We all burst out laughing—including Layla.

She had this sudden burst of clarity—an actual eureka moment:
“Wow… is this what you guys deal with all the time? I feel sorry for you!”

And in that moment—holy words indeed—a flicker of self-awareness. A rare solar eclipse in the Layla-verse. I said nothing, of course. What would’ve been the point? But inside, I nodded. Yes, Layla. Welcome to our personal sitcom.

And oh, the material we’d gathered. Comedy in bulk. Vivi, for one, had abandoned subtlety entirely—her disdain for Layla now in high-definition. She had the patience of a broken vending machine and used every opportunity to scold Layla like a strict matron on a school trip.

At one point, we stumbled into a late lunch—the only café open during the strange vacuum of siesta hours. By pure luck, it was just off our favourite square, where that enormous Ficus macrophylla lives like some enchanted beast, its theatrical roots spilling across the plaza like something straight out of Studio Ghibli. A homeless man had even constructed a makeshift den inside the tree, which reminded us weirdly of Stas and Nel, that Polish classic we all suffered through in fifth grade.

As we sat there sipping our Tinto de Verano (non-alcoholic beer for me, because someone had to keep the group alive), a man appeared pushing a stroller filled not with babies, but with five gleaming chihuahuas. Naturally, Layla reacted as expected: like a sugar-hyped nanny in a supermarket, snatching up toddlers before anyone could object. She picked up two of the dogs, who immediately began licking her face, and she collapsed into giggles like a five-year-old in a tickle ambush.

It was, admittedly, hilarious. The man, seizing the moment, used this surreal puppy ambush as a tactic to sell tissue packets. Which, to be fair, made a kind of odd logic. You get licked into a soggy mess—you need tissues. Fortunately, Layla didn’t need to buy any. Ever the overprepared chaos-mum, she had already distributed tissues to all of us on Day One, as if she were leading a school trip into the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Vivi sat next to her with a face so sour it could curdle wine. Pure visible discontent. Luckily, Layla was too enthralled by puppy love to notice. The whole thing was its own genre of comedy. I snapped a photo—my own little keepsake for when I’m old, wrinkled, and prone to nostalgic disbelief.

https://kashiaexplores.com/2025/02/21/the-moment-of-unexpected-connection/

The Art of Surviving Extreme Boredom: A Winter Tale

Valentine’s gift

Dear Younger Me, ( 16 years old)